I Keep Losing But The Team Keeps Winning

Vote for Jim.

I raced at Greenbelt tonight for the first time in a while. The curse of the GamJams review extends as far as the ones I neglect to do. Recent review of socks, I forget socks. Now that everyone reviewed that Cool Collar thing I'll probably burn my hand on a pot tomorrow.

Huge day at the site today. We turned the A/C on. This being a rehab, it hadn't been on in over a year and there was considerable question whether it would work or not. It did. It's a pretty profound difference in your life when you go from being in 100 degrees for 9 or 10 hours a day to being in 78 degrees. The terminal spentness with which I left the site each day was noticeably absent today.

So the race was pretty fun. I was told last week that a ride I'd been doing on Wednesdays wasn't hard enough, that I needed a harder ride, so I took this to heart and decided to go until I popped. I rode really hard in the beginning of the race, then took a lap or so off, then rode really hard again. I remember seeing six to go and thinking "ahh, I'll just chill until three to go and then start doing stuff." Then two guys went off the front and no one did anything. So much for chilling until three to go. At some point I made the center line equivalent of going through a very orange traffic light. I feel a little bad about it, but on the other hand it's never pissed me off when guys skirt to hit it. Skirt to skeeze up to fourth wheel to sit in a prime spot that you didn't earn and that pisses me off. Anyhow... I got a good gap one time, two dudes came up and the field was right on them so I sat up a bit and nothing happened so I countered myself. That wasn't as much of an abject failure as I'd expected it to be. I half expected that people would just say "ah screw it let him go" but that didn't happen. I wish it had. At some point a bell rang and I thought that Jeff S would benefit from the last lap being wicked fast so I did my best to make the last lap wicked fast. Jeff made the most of the situation and won, which was really cool.

Sometimes I read this blog called "CyclingTipsBlog" which is written by some fast Australian. He says to finish every workout hard since that's the way races roll, so last night after doing 2 x 20s I booked ass up Goldsboro and Mass from MacArthur. I think it's a good idea. I also started doing a bit of yoga. It's pretty cool for it to be August and be all psyched up like it's March. I want to do well in the race in Delaware in a couple of weeks. The result in Greenbelt is totally immaterial, but I'm disappointed in myself for not grinding on it to the finish. I'm not sure I could have hung for it, but neither am I sure I couldn't. I should be sure of that.

After the race a person who I like told me "man, you were pissing people off tonight," and I was like "aw Christ, what is it this time." Apparently people were bummed that I kept going hard. I can take that, every damn day. Gotta put the training into the training race.